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Howard Shelley and the Ulster Orchestra return for a second volume in Hyperion’s new Classical Piano Concerto series. Daniel Steibelt—the man who dared to challenge Beethoven and lost—ruled the keyboards of northern Europe for a quarter of a century, his own concertos as sensationally popular as their composer was ostentatious.

Reviews

‘The disc as a whole is worth hearing for Shelley’ (Gramophone)

‘Shelley brings Steibelt's music back to life with all the panache we have come to expect from the many other piano concertos he has recorded for Hyperion in their previous Romantic piano concerto series’ (Classic FM)» More

‘Howard Shelley offers lucid performances to flesh out the achievement of a man who is now as neglected as he once was lionized’ (The Irish Times)» More

‘This recording—the only one currently available to feature Steibelt’s concertos—reveals an imaginative style that relies on virtuoso solo playing and effect-laden orchestration which delighted contemporary audiences’ (Classical Ear)» More

‘Shelley, conducting from the keyboard, gets the simple fun to be found in the music, and the result is a fine choice for lovers of the Classical era piano concerto’ (AllMusic, USA)» More

‘Shelley’s playing is graceful and delivers the full value of Steibelt’s decorative tunes, many of them finely crafted and memorable … the orchestra
is superbly balanced with the piano, and while conducted from
the keyboard, their performance is unerringly intimate with the soloist. The recording is a welcome document of a deserving, if lesser known, composer’ (The Whole Note, Canada)» More

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Introduction

Two centuries and more ago the Viennese elite loved nothing more than a gladiatorial contest between keyboard virtuosi. A famous piano duel between Mozart and Clementi in December 1781 had ended without obvious victor or vanquished, even if Emperor Joseph II later declared that Mozart had displayed superior taste and refinement. In May 1800 things turned out rather differently when another visiting virtuoso, Daniel Steibelt, pitted himself against Beethoven at a music gathering at the home of Count Moritz von Fries. As reported by Beethoven’s one-time pupil Ferdinand Ries, Steibelt unwisely played a pre-prepared ‘improvisation’ on the theme Beethoven had used for variations in the finale of his Clarinet Trio, Op 11. Beethoven and his many admirers in Fries’s salon (this was hardly a level playing field!) were duly insulted, whereupon Beethoven improvised on a theme from the piano quintet Steibelt had just played, having derisively placed the quintet’s cello part upside down on the music rack. Humiliated, Steibelt left the room before Beethoven had even finished and, as Ries put it, ‘made it a condition that Beethoven not be invited when his own company was desired’.

While it is Steibelt’s fate to be remembered above all as the man who dared to challenge Beethoven and paid the price, for a quarter of a century he was fêted throughout northern Europe as one of the newly fashionable breed of keyboard lions. Born in Berlin of mixed parentage (his mother was French, his German father a keyboard manufacturer), he studied with the famous composer–theorist Johann Kirnberger, who had once been taught by J S Bach in Leipzig. He then joined the Prussian army, at his father’s insistence, and within a year had deserted to pursue an itinerant career as a pianist, taking care to keep well clear of Berlin. Settling in revolutionary Paris in 1790, Steibelt forged a reputation as a composer–pianist, promoting himself via a prodigious output of keyboard sonatas, potboilers—waltzes, bacchanals, divertissements and the like—and, from 1796, a series of eight keyboard concertos. Steibelt seems to have been a difficult man to like, at least in his younger days. Contemporary reports suggest he was vain, arrogant and ostentatiously extravagant, with a habit of disingenuously passing off old works as new. Yet at his peak he carried all before him with the vote-catching brilliance of his playing.

Having conquered Paris by the mid-1790s, Steibelt set out to captivate London audiences in two concerts mounted by the violinist and impresario Johann Peter Salomon, famous for his association with Haydn. The following year, 1798, he returned to London, where he introduced what became his most celebrated work: his Piano Concerto No 3 in E major, ‘L’orage’, Op 33, whose instant popularity was sealed by its ‘storm’ finale. While in London Steibelt married an English pianist who was also a dab hand on the tambourine, prompting him to add tambourine parts to many of his later works, not least the ‘Grand concerto militaire’.

Mozart’s great Viennese piano concertos, which were gradually appearing in print during the 1790s, provided a model for the Classical and early Romantic concerto. Yet only Beethoven followed the example of Mozart’s later concertos in integrating piano and orchestra within a symphonic framework. While broadly reproducing the formal plan of Mozart’s first movements, Steibelt, like his pianist–composer contemporaries (Clementi, Dussek, Joseph Woelfl, J B Cramer and the Irishman John Field), works on looser lines, with the emphasis on luxuriant keyboard figuration. Thematic development is virtually non-existent. The expansive opening Allegro of the E major concerto, scored for large forces, including a trombone, is typical: after a long orchestral introduction, dominated by the march rhythm often favoured by Mozart, the soloist interleaves a succession of mainly lyrical themes, some drawn from the introduction, with extended passages of keyboard pyrotechnics. From the amiable opening theme—a march for toy soldiers—all the melodies share a family likeness. Most memorable is the sinuous (and, to our ears, distinctly Mozartian) tune announced in the orchestral introduction, first on strings alone, then with an expressive bassoon underlay, and subsequently expanded and ‘romanticized’ by the soloist.

As a natural showman, Steibelt seemed to lack confidence writing and playing slow, sustained music. Many of his Andantes and Adagios use pre-existing melodies; and like the slow movement of the fifth concerto, the Adagio non troppo of No 3 taps into the vogue for Scottish folk tunes, gently sentimentalized for polite society. The ‘Scotch air’ is presented in the beguiling scoring of flute, two solo cellos and pizzicato bass, repeated by the soloist, then varied with delicate, quasi-improvisatory ornamentation. Phrases are sometimes transferred to the left hand against trills or countermelodies in the right—though as ever in these concertos, there is no real contrapuntal writing.

Steibelt’s finale caused a sensation, as he surely calculated it would. Headed ‘Rondo pastorale, in which is introduced an imitation of a storm’, the movement exploits the current fashion for naive pictorial effects. Musette drones and the nasal sonority of strings playing close to the bridge enhance the rusticity of the opening tune, while the storm that erupts in the middle of the movement features swirls of diminished sevenths and liberal use of tremolo—something of a Steibelt speciality. Within a few years this ‘storm rondo’ was being played in salons and concert halls across Europe.

After his discomfiture at Beethoven’s hands in 1800, Steibelt spent the next few years travelling between London and Paris. Amid reams of keyboard music, he composed two ballets for the King’s Theatre, Haymarket, and a staged intermezzo, La fête de mars, to celebrate Napoleon’s victory over the Austrians and Russians at Austerlitz. This was also the period of the Piano Concerto No 5 in E flat major, ‘À la chasse’, Op 64, published in 1802 and scored for the same large orchestra as Steibelt’s third piano concerto, minus one flute. Opening with a theme that recalls Mozart’s A major concerto K414 (which Steibelt surely knew), the first movement is warmer and more gracious than its spruce counterpart in No 3, taking advantage of the mellow timbre of strings in the key of E flat major. For the second theme, a dandified march, Steibelt turns from E flat major to the veiled key of G flat major, replicating—probably by coincidence—a similar flatwards shift in the opening Allegro of Beethoven’s first piano concerto. The formal pattern resembles that of No 3, with the soloist recasting the orchestra’s themes in a pianistic idiom and introducing its own cantabile melodies, interspersed by lightly accompanied bouts of bravura. In the movement’s central episode (‘development’ would be misleading) the G flat major march prompts a charming, quasi-Mozartian dialogue between piano, woodwind and a solo violin.

Although Steibelt does not advertise it in the score, the theme of the Adagio—scored for wind and pizzicato basses—is none other than ‘Ye banks and braes o’ bonnie Doon’, complete with ‘Scotch snap’ rhythms. As in the Adagio non troppo of No 3, the tune is followed by free, ornamental variations, initially for piano alone, then softly coloured by the woodwind. Launched by a volley of horn calls, the finale (Rondo vivace, ‘La chasse’) is another brilliantly effective genre piece, perfectly attuned to popular taste—the kind of music Beethoven was to transfigure a few years later in the finale of his ‘Emperor’ Concerto. Amid the braying tally-hos and keyboard glitter, an episode in C minor adds a note of delicate pathos. The pianissimo close poetically evokes the hunters receding into the distance.

In 1808 Steibelt abruptly left Paris to take up an appointment as director of the French Opera in St Petersburg, his departure precipitated by the need to escape his creditors. He remained in St Petersburg for the rest of his life, as director of the Opera and as maître de chapelle to Tsar Alexander I. While opera and ballet dominated his later years, he returned to his own instrument with concertos Nos 6–8, the last of which included a choral finale—an idea taken up by Henri Herz in his sixth piano concerto (1858), and more famously by Busoni in his piano concerto of 1902–4.

During the Napoleonic wars Dussek and Woelfl had each captured the spirit of the times with a ‘Military’ concerto. Around 1816, with Napoleon safely in exile on St Helena, Steibelt followed suit with his Piano Concerto No 7 in E minor, ‘Grand concerto militaire’. Ensuring that the concerto lives up to its billing, Steibelt uses the most lavish forces at his disposal. In the first of the two movements (he ducks the challenge of creating an original slow movement by omitting one altogether) he beefs up the orchestral textures with a pair of extra horns. Then in the finale he throws in the kitchen sink: extra military instruments (piccolo, cymbals, side drum and triangle) in the main orchestra, plus a second orchestra of wind and brass—in effect a military band—that includes a serpent and (with his wife conveniently at hand) a tambourine.

Steibelt marks the first movement Allegro maestoso, implying a certain solemnity and majesty. Military dotted rhythms rule, though the underlying chromatic harmonies give the opening theme a faintly melancholy air (shades here of Hummel’s virtually contemporary A minor concerto, Op 85). The keyboard-writing is even more brilliant than in the other concertos, with flamboyant cadenza-like passages and prolonged trills for the right hand in thirds—another Steibelt hallmark. As in Beethoven’s ‘Emperor’, the piano specializes in ‘de-militarizing’ the march themes with rhapsodic figuration, most poetically at the beginning of the widely modulating central episode.

Opening with the daintiest of marches, the finale is essentially military band music tricked out with frolicking cascades for the soloist. With no pretence to sophistication, this is a fun movement that trades in ear-tickling effects, courtesy of the two orchestras. It doubtless brought the house down when Steibelt played it in St Petersburg—a rare public performance from a pianist who by 1816 had all but retired from the concert platform but, on this evidence, had lost nothing of his famed panache.